Posts in Category "Acrobat"

The standard Adobe Acrobat and Reader installer, which are available for download on Adobe.com, and the installer for Adobe Reader MUI, include AIR. (There are separate installers for Acrobat and Reader that don’t install AIR, see ftp://ftp.adobe.com/pub/adobe/reader)

The AIR-Installer is included automatically and starts in a separate process after the Reader MSI is installed. If the installation of any subsequent MSP patches starts too quickly after the MSI installation, then you receive an error as the AIR installer starts. You can work around this with a short delay in your installation routine between the MSI and MSP installers.

The AIR installation remains on the machine even after Reader is uninstalled and has to be removed separately. (There is no option to disable it.)

After AIR is installed, it requires an automatic update to be installed from the internet. Machines that do not have internet access cannot get this update.

Solution

If you don’t want to install AIR, you have two options to disable the AIR installer from the Adobe Reader installation package:

When you view PDF files in Adobe Acrobat or Adobe Reader in a Terminal Server/Citrix environment, the display is slow to update over an RDP connection. This issue is particularly noticeable when scrolling through PDF documents that contain high-resolution images.

Solutions

Solution 1: Update the Page Display preferences in Acrobat or Reader.

Change the following settings in Acrobat or Reader. You can either disable these options directly in Reader/Acrobat under “Edit > Preferences > Page Display > Rendering”, or using the registry keys for system administrators:

Changing registry values is not officially supported by Adobe and you do so at your own risk. You should only be changing the registry settings if you have the correct privileges and experience in this area.

System Administrators should change these settings first using the Preferences dialog in Adobe Reader (not using the registry) and re-test the performance through Citrix. Once you have the right combination of settings that work, then you should record the values of these registry keys to use for your other Reader installations. This is important as the value of the iAntialiasThreshold key can differ (0, 1, or 12) depending on which of the other options are deactiviated.

Note: These settings will improve the display performance on low-bandwidth connections, however, they can adversely affect the display performance on LAN connections. You will need to test these thoroughly.

Solution 2: Use an RDP compression tool to compress the data being sent “over-the-wire.”

RDP sends the entire set of image data each time the image is scrolled on the page. Sending all the data at once can cause congestion on the network connection, especially with limited bandwidth. Some customers have had success using the following tool to improve the display performance on Terminal Server for low-bandwidth connections: http://www.ericom.com/ericom_blaze.asp

Additional information

There are no general solutions in Acrobat or Reader to improve performance problems in Terminal Server. Performance issues are often based on the bandwidth limitations of the network connection, or the RDP protocol itself.

The RDP protocol does not always handle image data well. A terminal server on Windows 2003 Server uses RDP version 5.2. A terminal server on Windows 2008 Server uses RDP version 7.0, which does improve display performance for images. Therefore, an upgrade to a later operating system can also improve the performance if it uses a more recent RDP version like 7.0.

It is not possible to set the access property of an individual radio button at run-time in Acrobat or Reader 9, or Acrobat or Reader 7. This was possible in Acrobat/Reader 8.

Solution

Set the property on the exclusion group level (that is, the parent object) and not on the field level. For radio button lists, set the property at the Radio-Button group object and not the individual button object.

Additional information

From Designer 7.1 Help:

About Radio buttons

Radio buttons are contained within exclusion groups. Only one radio button in the exclusion group can be selected at a time.
An exclusion group can be manipulated as one object. Some options on the Object palette apply to all of the radio buttons in the same exclusion group.

….

Radio button properties in the Value tab

When you create an exclusion group of radio buttons, the Value tab presents a number of options that you can apply to the entire group.

When you use Customization Wizard 9 to configure the installation for Adobe Reader or Acrobat 9, hosts for privileged locations are written to the wrong registry location. Therefore Acrobat or Reader won’t recognize them at runtime and these sites will not be trusted. You could see the Yellow-Message-Bar warning about untrusted site access if these hosts are referenced from a PDF file.

Solution

This issue is resolved in Customization Wizard 10, so privileged locations are written correctly in Acrobat and Reader X. Adobe doesn’t issue patches for Customization Wizard, so there’s no way to fix this issue retrospectively for Acrobat or Reader 9. As a workaround, you can change the keys manually in the registry. Or, you can enter the values directly in the enhanced security settings in Acrobat or Reader preferences.

Security restrictions in Adobe Reader and Acrobat 9 restrict you from opening local files (Excel, Word, and so on) from within a PDF using Javascript (launchURL). This action poses a security risk for the PDF file, and could allow dangerous files to be opened, and a script to be executed.

In previous versions of Acrobat or Reader (before 9.0), you can point the HTTP Submit button to a file:// URL on a network/local file system. The local file was “downloaded” using the browser’s plug-in. This behavior is not the intention of the HTTP Submit button. So, it’s been locked down in Acrobat and Reader 9 and later.

The HTTP submit button is used to send the form’s data to a server once the form has been filled. The resulting PDF can then be displayed to the user.

To reference or open local files from a PDF, run the PDF file in a privileged context (in the Javascript console or in a batch process). Or, certify the PDF file. If you are running Acrobat or Reader in a browser context, you could put the local file on a web server and use the HTTP URL.

You can find more information to this security restriction under “app” and then the “methods” tab, and then under the launchURL method:

Note: Beginning with Acrobat 8.1, file and JavaScript URLs can be executed only when operating in a privileged context, such as during a batch event. File and JavaScript URLs begin with the scheme names javascript or file.

“Adobe Reader 9 drops support for Adobe Reader Extensions 5 and 6 which permit Adobe Reader client software to save changes to filled-in forms in PDFs. Adobe Reader Extensions 6.1 and newer are still supported. Legacy PDFs are still viewable, however they open with the warning “This document enables Reader capabilities that are no longer enabled in this Reader version.”

This change in discussed in the Reader Extensions upgrade information on adobe.com:

If you are using Adobe Reader/Acrobat in an enterprise environment you may need to customize the installation with pre-defined settings and options so that all users in your environment have the same installation settings.

Currently you can do this using the standard Customization Wizard to create transform (MST) files which apply customized settings to the installation. Using an MST, you will then need to call the command line installation routines to install the product. Alternatively, you may also edit the setup.ini file, and then install the product using the setup.exe executable. The advantage of this method is that it is using the familiar setup.exe installation process, and you can apply settings and multiple patches in one step.

The following are some examples of setup.ini files to achieve various common tasks:

1. Install a subset of languages with the MUI version of Adobe Reader:

Start the installation using the setup.exe file and it uses the options specified in the setup.ini file.

2. Use the command line installer.

Use a command similar to the following:

msiexec /i AcroRead.msi TRANSFORMS=AR94.mst LANG_LIST=DEU

where AR94.mst can be a custom MST transformation with customer-specific Reader configurations. This command line installs the German (DEU) and English languages. The English language is always installed even if it is not explicitly listed in the LANG_LIST.

When you open a PDF file in Adobe Acrobat/Reader you may notice that the client reads the following registry keys repeatedly:

HKEY_USERS\…\Control Panel\International\sDecimal

HKEY_USERS\…\Control Panel\International\sThousand

The result of reading these keys if often BUFFER OVERFLOW. It’s unnecessary for Acrobat/Reader to access these registry keys multiple times when opening a single PDF file. If you’re using Terminal Server environments, where only one client services multiple users, this issues can lead to performance degradation.

Solution

Update to Adobe Acrobat/Reader 9.4 or X.

Additional information

It’s common for a BUFFER OVERFLOW to occur when reading registry keys on application startup. This error doesn’t necessarily point to a memory issue in Acrobat/Reader. Adobe Acrobat/Reader 9.4, X and later have been updated to access these keys only once when opening a PDF file. The number of BUFFER OVERFLOW events is therefore also reduced.

Installing Reader 9.1 modifies Registry permissions for key HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Interface\{34A715A0-6587-11D0-924A-0020AFC7AC4D} from “Full Control” to “Read“. This modification prevents a successful installation in enterprise environments where customized installer files are used. The mentioned key is a part of the Internet Explorer installation and applications that work with the web browser events use it.

The Access Control List for this key before installation is as follows:

BUILTIN\Users=Read

BUILTIN\Power Users=Special

BUILTIN\Administrators=FullControl

NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM=FullControl

CREATOR OWNER=FullControl

Following installation it has been changed to:

BUILTIN\Administrators=Read

NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM=FullControl

Everyone=Read

Solution

Upgrade to Adobe Reader 9.4 or Adobe Reader X. Do a full installation of one of these versions to apply the fix.

As a workaround, you can modify the MST file with Customization Wizard to prevent the permissions on this key being changed.

When you use the xfa.host.getFocus() method in your form templates you may notice different behavior in Acrobat or Reader 9 compared to previous versions. The method doesn’t work, returns null, or returns the following error:

xfa.host.getFocus is not a function

Solution

Set the target version to 8.1 or later in the Default tab of the template properties in Designer. Or, use the AcrobatVersion parameter in the API. The AcrobatVersion parameter takes precedence over the definition in the template. However, you can use the AcrobatVersion value “Auto” to use the version defined in the templates.

Additional information

The getFocus() method was implemented in XFA 2.6 (Reader 8.1). If the PDF is rendered with a target version less than 8.1, the call to getFocus doesn’t work. The target version of a template is defined either:

in the XDP template using the Default tab under the template properties, or using the <?formServer defaultPDFRenderFormat acrobat8.1dynamic?> tag in the XML source

in the AcrobatVersion setting in the PDFFormRenderSpec when calling the renderPDFForm() method from the Forms API

There is one special case in Acrobat/Reader 8, which allows the call to getFocus() even if the target version is less than 8.1. Therefore, you do not need to use one of the solutions above for Acrobat or Reader 8. This behavior is a bug in Acrobat 8 as it doesn’t respect the target version and relevant XFA definition. In Acrobat 9, the target version is respected.

When Adobe Reader or Acrobat is deployed in the enterprise with enhanced security turned on, warnings can appear in the client. The warnings appear when Acrobat tries to merge data into a PDF. These warnings are confusing to the users and you may want to suppress them by defining the source of the data as trusted.

Solution

Define the sites that host the PDF and data files as trusted. You can do this by adding the site where the data is stored to the Windows trusted sites list (Windows > Control Panel > Internet Settings > Security), or to the enhanced security settings in Acrobat/Reader (Edit> Preferences > Enhanced Security).

The Windows trusted sites list is saved under the following registry key:

Adobe Reader MUI is Adobe’s Multilingual User Interface version, with which you can install any combination of supported languages. For example, you can install French, German, and Spanish simultaneously and then switch among those languages within Adobe Reader. The user interface changes to the appropriate language automatically.

If you have problems controlling the startup language of Adobe Reader MUI, then try the following to gain more fine-grained control over the startup language:

Under the Reader preferences, there is a setting for the startup language under the section entitled “International.” You can set this setting to the language of choice. Or, you can set it to “like operating system,” which starts Adobe Reader MUI using the same locale as the host operating system.

Set the registry key UseMUI as outlined in the screenshot so that the operating system language is used as the Adobe Reader MUI startup language:

If you are still having problems with the startup language, try manually configuring the appropriate keys in the registry. Use either the Customization wizard (for enterprise deployments), or change them directly in the Windows registry for single installations.

Delete (or make sure that the following keys are not present) NOTE: for a fresh non-customized install these keys are sometimes not present: